Top Ten Acts of The Clinton Administration To
Divide Americans By Race and Ethnicity

by Arturo Silva

On June 14, at the University of California, San Diego, President
Clinton will deliver a speech on racial reconciliation and unveil a "race
initiative." Whatever the President proposes, the black leadership
group Project 21 has put together this Top 10 List to remind every American,
of every race, that the President may speak the language of reconciliation,
but his Administration has instituted and enforced policies of racial and
ethnic division.

* * *

Number 10. Using quotas to choose delegates to the Democratic National
Convention.

The 1996 Delegate Selection Rules by the Democratic National Committee
required that the racial make-up of the delegates from each state exactly
match the racial make-up of voters in the state.

Number 9. Distrusting the intelligence of minorities, the Administration
refuses to count 10% of all Americans in the 2000 Census.

* To correct a disproportionately high undercount of minorities in the
1990 Census, the Census Bureau plans to unconstitutionally only count 90%
of Americans, leaving statisticians to guess the racial make-up and location
of the rest of Americans. Rather than spend more on minority outreach and
hire people in their local communities to fulfill a constitutional function
of the Commerce Department to count everyone, the Census Bureau has decided
that minorities are incapable of filling out census forms.

4 In a reversal of a previous position, Clinton's then-assistant attorney
general in charge of civil rights, Deval Patrick, chose to back the Piscataway
High School board in its decision to use race as a means of determining
whether to lay off a black or white teacher of equal qualifications. The
white teacher lost her job because the school board said the black teacher
added to the diversity of the business education department of the school.

Number 7. Exploiting ethnic and racial politics to get votes and raise
money.

* African-Americans, Asians, Indians, and Hispanics were among the racial
groups targeted with bribes of administrative positions and favors for
donating political contributions and using balkanizing outreach plans to
increase ethnic and racial votes for President Clinton.

Number 6. Listing the race and ethnicity of its political supporters
in a centralized database.

* The White House received criticism for using public funds to maintain
a database of political supporters used for campaign purposes. Little criticism,
however, was directed at the information on political contributors which
went beyond name and address and actually included supporters' race and
ethnicity. Even more appalling was that some of the ethnic classifications
were based on physical appearance or the ethnic origins of the supporters'
names.

Number 5. Backing special interests over the interests of the nation
and minorities.

* President Clinton has reversed previous support for school choice and
bowed to the National Education Association despite the popularity of school
choice among African- Americans. As governor of Arkansas, President Clinton
sent a letter to Wisconsin state legislator Polly Williams praising her
for her school choice bill: "I am fascinated by that [school choice]
proposal and am having my staff analyze it. I'm concerned that the traditional
Democratic Party establishment has not given you more encouragement. The
visionary is rarely embraced by [the] status quo."

* As President, Clinton has opposed a school choice initiative in California
and released the following statement in 1996 regarding a school choice
provision in the 1995 District of Columbia Appropriations Act: "...establishing
a private-school voucher system in the nation's capital would set a dangerous
precedent for using federal taxpayer funds for private schools across the
country."

Number 4. Unfairly accusing political opponents of Administration policies
as being racists.

* After the Administration's fundraising scandal broke, a Commerce Department
memo recommended attacking Republicans and other critics of the scandal
as being anti-Asian.

* President Clinton, in his State of the Union speech, defended the fundraising
scandal by playing the race card and implying critics of his fundraising
techniques harbored anti-Asian sentiments.

* In another incident, White House spokesman Mike McCurry asserted that
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott's initial criticism of African-American
Secretary of Labor nominee Alexis Herman was based more on her race than
on her ethical standards.

Number 3. Using the Justice Department to oppose California's Proposition
209.

* The Clinton Administration's Justice Department filed an amicus curiae
brief against Proposition 209. The brief argued that the proposition, which
would bar California state government agencies from discriminating on the
basis of race and sex, was unconstitutional. The proposition was approved
by 54% of California's voters in the 1996 general election.

* Prior to Proposition 209's passage, then-White House Chief of Staff Leon
Panetta threatened to cut off all federal funding to California when the
California Board of Regents eliminated admissions preferences and quotas.
Panetta stated: "Obviously we're going to be reviewing our contract
laws and the provision of resources to that state."

* Norma Cantu, assistant secretary of education and chief of the Education
Department's Office of Civil Rights, sent out letters to Texas state universities
informing them that the Fifth Circuit Court's ruling in Hopwood v. Texas
that different admissions policies for blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Asians
are unconstitutional should be ignored. She further insinuated that if
these race-based admissions policies were ended, the universities could
lose $500 million in federal funds for scholarships, work study, and research
grants. She was later forced to back down on her threat.

Number 1. Defending and continuing government racial preference programs.

* On June 12, 1995, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Adarand Constructors
v. Pena that federal set-asides must meet the following "strict
scrutiny" test: (1) Set-asides must meet a compelling state interest
to remedy specific factual findings of discrimination, and (2) race-neutral
remedies must be considered before racial preferences. Furthermore, the
remedy must be directed only toward identified victims of past discrimination
and cannot extend longer than the discriminatory effects it was intended
to eliminate.

* Rather than comply with Adarand, the Administration has sought
to do everything in its power to ignore it. In response to Adarand,
the Justice Department released a memo written by Assistant Attorney
General Walter Dellinger that provides legal instructions to the general
counsels of executive agencies on what arguments to make to oppose Adarand.

* The memo was followed by "Affirmative Action Review: A Report
to the President," by two White House aides that did not recommend
eliminating even one of the existing 171 federal affirmative action programs.

* The Administration continues to litigate Adarand in its quest
to maintain its racial preference programs. It has argued that Congress
is exempt from the "strict scrutiny" standard. The Administration
also contends that since Adarand Constructors wins half the guardrail contracts
in Colorado, that is enough evidence that racial discrimination exists
and the government should be free to continue to award cash payments to
contractors who award subcontracts to disadvantaged entities. On June 3,
1997, the Colorado federal court rejected these latest arguments by the
Administration.

* A series of official memos from the Executive Branch demonstrate that
the "mend it, don't end it" slogan of the Clinton Administration
is flashy rhetoric for maintaining the status quo. A memorandum by the
Undersecretary of Defense said the following to his subalterns: "I
need to be consulted whenever you are confronting the possibility that
any excepted position [i.e., political appointment] or any career position
at GS-15 level and higher is likely to be filled by a candidate who will
not enhance... diversity."

* Another memo out of the Defense Department stated that, "In the
future, special permission will be required for the promotion of all white
men without disabilities."

* Yet another memo, this one from the National Park Service's director,
stated: "Surely, we must be able to find a use for a Swahili-speaking
person who has Peace Corps experience, is a cum laude in English from Harvard
and has a biological background in date manipulation... Unfortunately,
Mr. Trevor is white, which is too bad."

* While these memos are revealing, the real proof of the Administration's
support for quotas can be found in the policies and positions of executive
branch departments and agencies including the Departments of Justice, Housing
and Urban Development, Labor, Education, Transportation, Defense, Health
and Human Services as well as the Small Business Administration.

Honorable Mentions:

I. Playing racial politics with Haitian refugees.

* In the midst of his 1992 campaign for the Democratic nomination, candidate
Clinton was quoted in the Miami Herald as saying: "I think
the president [George Bush] played racial politics with the Haitian refugees.
I wouldn't be shipping those poor people back." As President, Clinton
said in a radio address to the Haitian people: "Those who do leave
Haiti for the United States by boat will be stopped and directly returned
by the United States Coast Guard." According to his own standard,
Clinton is guilty of playing racial politics.

II. Granting U.S. citizenship to potentially Democratic voters before
the election.

* The Clinton Administration granted U.S. citizenship to 180,000 immigrants
without background checks to increase the Democratic vote in the 1996 Presidential
election. Was the ethnicity of an immigrant taken into account when deciding
if an immigrant was likely to vote for Democrats?

III. Nominating political appointees based on whether they "look
like America."

* In his book Values Matter Most, Ben Wattenberg, a syndicated
columnist anda former aide to President Lyndon Johnson, wrote of
the first Clinton Administration: "...President Clinton began to look
like President Bean Counter by appointing an administration to look like
America, rather than to think like America." Wattenberg went on to
write: "Just about every other [Clinton] appointee in charge of the
various civil rights bureaucracies within government came from the activist
ranks of the quota-pushers." Wattenberg described Mary Frances Berry,
Clinton's pick for chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission on Civil Rights,
as "the all-time, all-star quintessential queen of the quotacrats."
According to Wattenberg, Berry once wrote that "civil rights laws
were not passed to give civil rights to all Americans... [but only] to
disfavored groups [such as] blacks, Hispanics and women."

Arturo R. Silva is coordinator for the African-American leadership
group Project 21, a project of the The National Center for Public Policy
Research.